Thank you to our jurors for the senior category — Sue Chenette, Kevin Spenst, and Aaron Tucker — and the junior category — Raoul Fernandes, Richard Kemick, and Jacob McArthur Mooney — for their hard work in selecting these six winners and four honourable mentions. Without further ado, we present your 2017 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize winners:

This sparse poem depicts violent aftermath with startlingly subtle and clear imagery, allowing the reader to view and evaluate the scattered remains of a barbershop’s bizarre corpse and arrange the surreal tableau from the objects of the text, rather than relying on the prior drama of the robbery. —Juror Aaron Tucker

The voice in “How to Look at the Sun” moves with confidence and fluidity, sustaining a fine balance between an almost-submerged narrative and images that both mask and convey it. …This is a poem that engages us in a resonant complexity of experience and leaves its remarkable images echoing in the reader’s mind. –Juror Sue Chenette

As a poem “The Moth” burns bright with visceral similes and metaphors, stunning rhetorical effects and electric language that hums. Confidence in a confluence of ideas and images runs through the poem from start to finish and the lushness of the entire effect draws one back to the poem for multiple readings. –Juror Kevin Spenst